20 Aug
2006
20 Aug
'06
9:15 p.m.
jim stephens wrote:
On mine all the individual wires insulation that was in the bundle
seem to be okay. there is a huge amount of fine wire, that flew
out, and some shield wrapping, that makes it look worse than
it is. I think the actual 5 conductors's insulation survived, not
the stupid sheathing that they used to try to make the stiff curled
action work.
I think the only problem you might have with a *replacement*
coiled cord would be the short distance from the *plug* that
the coils begin. Most coiled cords that I have come across
tend to have a long-ish uncoiled portion adjacent to the plug.
(I should measure this and keep it handy when digging
through salvage as I could possibly come up with a suitable
replacement -- you may have to "adjust" the portion inside the
keyboard but that's relatively easy)
I've emailed three different versions of the setup/test/inspect
floppies. The versions I have that are newer than those I
emailed are 1.44M images so I think that's a problem for the
portable iii.
Ah, so they are similar internally? The Posrtable 386 is
obviously more desirable beast... At the very least, I would
assume you can stuff more than the 6.6MB max RAM that the
portable 3 handles. :-(
Don wrote:
IIRC, a dead CMOS battery can lead to all sorts of weird
behaviours. I know I almost discarded mine originally
because it *appeared* dead...
jim stephens wrote:
> Cameron Kaiser wrote:
>
>>> How do you know the keyboard is "incompletely connected"?
>>> I assume that those "few threads" are actually capable of
>>> carrying current?
I think you should get a keyboard error number on the screen, so unless the
keyboard problem you have has zapped the 5v supply to the keyboard
and caused some other collateral damage to the system, you have some
other problem as well. I just unpacked one that had been stored in a
reasonable warehouse
environment,
this week, and when I pulled off the keyboard, the insulation
sheathing totally disintegrated.
This is not A Good Thing. Ah, I
hadn't realized anything other than the Compaq setup/test/install
disk worked!
good enough if you have a drive type 2 or 4, which were the most common
drive types shipped with it.
I customized my bios, to support a 512mb drive, and it requires being
able to do up higher. There were some excellent setup utilities that were
introduced after the AT was out for a while, whose name escapes me,
that could do higher numbers to be compatable with such as the phoenix
bios that began to come out then. I thought the
Portable III was strictly a 286. The "Portable 386"
was it's lookalike 386 cousin?
Most accessories fit in both, and I think the frame is identical. By the way, the setup disks are on the compaq web
site. I'll have
to scrounge what I sent to Don Y and send you a link. I have them
somewhere also, if you cannot find them.
I made a copy of the Portable 3 related stuff some years ago
so let me know if you can't find something.
They are on the ftp site, not the normal Hp / Compaq
web site.
Yes, that rings a bell.
I think there was a search engine over ftp.compaq.com
that let you
do intelligent searches and hit the setup disks but they seem to be
gone. so now all you have is a huge list of "SP's" if I recall that
have to be expanded and written to floppy after downloading.
and little info as to what is which.
However they seem to have a long list of old stuff there.